Holmes and Detective Stories

The first thing I noticed about this Sherlock Holmes story is that it is written in the first person from the perspective of Holmes's closest colleague, Dr. Watson. This was a smart move because if the story were told from Holmes's perspective, the reader would know the outcome of the story before they came to the end. Instead, the reader is allowed to use their own reasoning to try and solve the mystery themselves. Allowing the reader to be the detective should be a very important element of all detective stories, although I haven't read any others. Arthur Conan Doyle makes this clear in his story when Holmes makes the statement, "...I fancy I may have deduced a little more but I imagine that you saw all that I did." This lets the reader know nothing has been left out and that it is possible from what they've read to also deduce the outcome of this story. A detective story is also never complete without a surprise ending, and Sherlock Holmes doesn't fail in that aspect at all. To guess that Roylott was the killer is not so unlikely, but to guess that he had trained an adder to crawl through a ventilator and down a rope would have been ridiculous, at least until it was actually the truth.